Lawfare Archive: Trump Gives Classified Material to the Russians
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
From May 15, 2017: This afternoon, the Washington Post broke a major story: Donald Trump disclosed highly classified material to the Russian ambassador and Foreign Minister in the Oval Office last week, compromising a highly sensitive counterterrorism program run by an allied intelligence service. This evening, we got former DNI General Counsel Robert Litt on the line for a discussion with Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes of the latest mess. Litt helped coordinate and manage the intelligence community's response to the Edward Snowden revelations, so he knows a little something about responding to massive intelligence disclosures. They talked about how bad the disclosure may be, what the remedies for it are, and what we still don't know.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair, that's patreon.com slash |
| 0:16.8 | LawFair. Also check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:39.5 | I'm Geo Kokatakis, intern at LawFair. On June 8, 2023, former President Donald Trump |
| 0:46.6 | was charged in the Southern District of Florida for his alleged and proper removal of classified |
| 0:51.4 | documents from the White House tomorrow logo. The case in Florida, however, is not the |
| 0:56.5 | first time the former president has allegedly mishandled classified information. For today's |
| 1:02.1 | archive episode, I picked an episode from May 15, 2017, in which Benjamin Wittis and Susan |
| 1:09.3 | Hennessy sat down with former office of the director of National Intelligence General |
| 1:13.9 | Council Robert Litt to discuss Trump's disclosure of highly classified material to the Russian |
| 1:20.0 | ambassador and foreign minister, compromising a highly sensitive counterterrorism program run |
| 1:25.6 | by an allied intelligence service. They discussed how bad the disclosure may have been at the |
| 1:30.2 | time, what the remedies were for it, and more. |
| 1:42.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast May 15, Special Emergency Edition. |
| 1:48.5 | The Washington Post is reporting this evening as you probably already know that Donald |
| 1:54.0 | Trump committed an egregious act of disclosure of highly sensitive intelligence information |
| 2:02.4 | in a meeting with you guessed it, Sergei Kislyak, ambassador of Russia and Sergei Lavrov, |
| 2:10.5 | the foreign minister of Russia, last week. It's a shocking story and we decided to |
| 2:18.5 | put together an emergency podcast on it. I'm here with Susan Hennessy, LawFair's managing |
| 2:25.5 | editor, and we have on the line one of my oldest intelligence friends in Washington, Bob |
| 2:33.5 | Litt, who unfortunately is no longer the general counsel to the DNI, the intelligence community |
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